1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of computer based search systems, and more particularly relates to a system and method for synthesizing information-bearing content from multiple channels.
2. Description of Related Art
The explosive growth of content available on the World-Wide-Web has led to an increased demand and opportunity for a means of collaborating information. People are increasingly finding it difficult to sort through the great mass of content available with apparent relevance to even a narrowly defined need. They are overwhelmed with information and greatly desire appropriate tools or services that can aggregate relevant content and produce appropriate distillations or summarizations. Further, the ease with which content can be made available on the Internet, along with the greater speed with which “raw” content is generally made available, has created a greater-than-ever need for efficient means of judging the correctness of information. Strictly human-based editorial judgment is becoming no longer viable or desirable.
A typical search engine possesses a user interface with a search window where the user enters an alphanumeric search expression or keywords. The search engine sifts through a database of information for the user's search terms, and returns the search results in the form of HTML pages. Each search result includes a list of individual entries that have been identified by the search engine as satisfying the user's search expression. Each entry or “hit” includes a hyperlink that points to a location within the database. In addition to the hyperlink, certain search engine result pages include a summary or abstract that describes the content of the document. Other information may also be returned as part of a search result in response to a user's request.
Although search engines have made tremendous strides at improvement in recent years, the tremendous volume of the content simply makes the search engine cumbersome to use. The user is forced to manually sort through a long list of results to try and determine what is most important to him. Additionally, many of the results returned contain the same information, making it even more difficult to find the true article of interest.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above, and particularly for a method of synthesizing the information-bearing content from multiple channels into condensed digests in order to maximize efficiency of a search.